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How This Vegetarian Mom Ended Up With a Carnivore Baby

by Word of Mom Blogger on January 30, 2014

Word of Mom Blogger

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Motherhood – and more specifically, feeding my ten-and-a-half-month-old Lilli Virginia -- sounded a lot easier in the abstract. I know I had rules and ideas in mind when this all started, but things change. For instance, I had vowed that no child of mine would have sweets until their first birthday. But I didn't predict our friends would invite us over to enjoy freshly baked pumpkin and apple pies. That's when the negotiating started:

"Well, he did go to the pumpkin patch and choose this specific pumpkin, brought it home and roasted it. And he did pick the apples from the orchard and peel them at this table." And all of a sudden I'm feeding my baby warm pumpkin pie. Thank heavens Lilli was asleep when we brought her to the apple orchard -- the negotiating I would have had to do not to feed her a warm cider doughnut would have been ugly.

Although I write a mostly-vegetarian food blog, I didn't stay vegetarian during my pregnancy. "For the baby," my midwife would say. And I didn't think it would be wise to have a vegetarian baby... Can you imagine the hate mail I'd get if I did?

Now that she's here, she eats what we eat. In our house, that means lots of fruit and vegetables, fish, and grains and beans I cook up in my beloved pressure cooker. We initially tried giving her purees of everything we ate. But the looks she would give us were easy to read: Why am I eating mushy food while you're eating pieces of food, with utensils, no less?

So we looked to baby-led weaning for help in feeding our skeptical baby. Not weaning as in ending breastfeeding. Weaning in this case is a British term meaning you let your baby feed herself. Instead of mashing her foods, we started serving Lilli pieces of whatever we were eating. She was about six months old when we started feeding her solid foods. (Babies don't develop their fine motor skills and the pincer grasp until the eighth or ninth month, so the pieces of food had to be big enough for her to grasp. The pieces were large enough for her to grasp and gnaw on, large enough so that she couldn't get the whole thing in her mouth and choke.) Gone were the spoons full of mashed sweet potatoes, and in were slices of fresh peppers and peaches. If we were eating mushroom pizza, she was right alongside us, slurping up the roasted mushrooms.

But I held out on giving her meat until September, when we went to my parents' home for the Jewish high holidays, My mom cut up one of her famous sweet and sour meatballs, the ones she has slow-cooking on the stove for when relatives and guests trickle in all different times. We moved Lilli and her high chair to the deck, and Mom placed my old Peter Rabbit dish (now Lilli's Peter Rabbit dish, I guess) in front of her, stepped back and watched. Well, Lilli started eating the meatball. And ate and ate. And when there was no more meatball to eat, she picked up the bowl, licked it inside and out, and then put the dish in the pouch of her bib!

"Your baby loves meat," my mom observed, somewhat to my chagrin.

Of course, we continue to feed Lilli what we eat. My husband, who is more a meat-eater, is happy to use our baby's palate as an excuse to cook meat on the weekends. I also caught him telling Lilli last week that the melon she was eating for dessert shouldn't be confused with real dessert, which is cake and cookies. I still hope I can keep in place my rules about not eating in the car and only eating at the table.

And "baby led" doesn't mean "baby gets to choose." Those rules are as much for us as they are for her. But who knows? It's much easier in the abstract. I think the lesson is not to hold on too closely to what you expected while you were expecting.

Molly Parr lives in the Boston neighborhood of Lower Allston with her husband Rich, their young daughter Lilli Virginia and their cat Rooster. She shares her stories and recipes on the mostly vegetarian food blog Cheap Beets. You can follow her on Twitter where she tweets about interesting stories in the world of food and beyond.